I posted an image on Twitter earlier in the week, which showed how many assists each Premier League team has got this season against their expected assist rate from my Chance Quality system.
As the top two overachievers meet at Anfield on Saturday lunchtime, I thought it was worth taking a closer look at their figures to see if either side has an edge in any particular area of the pitch.
Regular readers will know that one of my projects this season is monitoring the quality of chance that teams in the Premier League create, based on the area of the pitch in which the key pass is received.
With a shade over half of the season gone, I thought I’d review the individual figures for Liverpool’s squad to see who has done well, and whose chances aren’t worth the grass they’re passed across.
I don’t post these round ups every week as there’s not always much of note worth sharing, but as I spotted a few interesting firsts and other bits and bobs this week, I thought it was worth posting them here.
Despite Liverpool registering their joint-second best goal tally for the Premier League era in 2012/13 with seventy-one, Brendan Rodgers has targeted a further twenty goals next season.
Just two sides in the last ten seasons have scored ninety-one goals, so it probably isn’t a realistic target in truth, but if the Reds are to get close then they will need to create a hell of a lot of clear-cut chances (or ‘CCCs’ for short).
Opta define such opportunities as “A situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score usually in a one-on-one scenario or from very close range”, and I have compiled the figures (via EPLIndex) for the big six teams for the previous three seasons to try to establish where Liverpool need to improve in order to make Brendan Rodgers’ goalscoring dream a reality.
Although Liverpool are struggling to score goals and win league games at the moment, on the face of it things aren’t so bad as at least they are creating plenty of chances. At the time of writing they have set up 136 goal-scoring opportunities in the 2012/13 Premier League, and only Everton (155) and Tottenham Hotspur (143) can currently better that tally.
However, whilst a regular chance is relatively easy to engineer (as for instance a player passing to a player who then hits a no-hope shot from 30 yards is said to have created a chance), for a team to be really successful they need to set up (and then obviously score) plenty of clear-cut chances (CCCs).
This is where the Reds are failing at present.
Bass Tuned To Red 